Day-to-Day Data Collection to Drive Improved Impact

–>Who:  Rick Jacobus, Managing Director of Affordable Homeownership at…
–> What: … NCB Capital Impact, talks about HomeKeeper, a day-to-day tool for affordable housing organizations to collect meaningful program data, improve their performance, and compare themselves against sector standards using common metrics.
–> How: Listen to this interview, learn more about HomeKeeper, and Cornerstone Partnership (NCB Capital Impact’s larger project).
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On her journey to spotlight the people and organizations that are making the world move in new and exciting ways, Sonia Chokshi talks to Rick Jacobus, Managing Director of Affordable Homeownership at NCB Capital Impact, at SOCAP’12.
As social entrepreneurs gain more ground in both the business and social impact realms, they have begun feeling the push for data and metric collection, particularly from funders and investors. With the creation of systems like GIIRS and IRIS, organizations can be held up to a common standard of metrics and compared with one another in terms of the amount impact they are actually making.
Unfortunately, however, these systems are not perfectly designed. Primarily, they are created to help impact investors make informed decisions about which of many organizations to fund; therefore, the metrics they include are broad, generalized to include a wide range of organizations from various sectors. While these metrics are important to procure funding, they are not tailored enough to provide vital data that help these organizations actually improve their on-the-ground programs, and they don’t fit into the day-to-day workflow, requiring additional data collection and synthesis on the part of staff members.
In this interview, NCB Capial Impact’s Rick Jacobus talks about HomeKeeper, their data collection product designed for the organization in mind. Created specifically for affordable housing organizations, HomeKeeper is a tool that is used on a day-to-day basis to help those running these projects to manage their work more efficiently, and almost as an afterthought – it scrapes all the data from their inputs, showing each individual organization how they are performing individually, and as compared to the industry standard. Built with the user, not the investor, at the center, this software allows organizations to narrow down and understand exactly where there are gaps in their programs, so they can take targeted action steps to actually improve their impact.
Next, Jacobus envisions a tool like HomeKeeper for each sector, where this basic infrastructure can be applied to a new set of metrics that are specific and useful for a new set of organizations. This important shift in the methods and standards used to collect and apply data are vital for organizations in any area to ensure that they’re really making the impact they set out to accomplish.
Learn more about HomeKeeper, and Cornerstone Partnership.
 
This article is a part of a series produced at SOCAP12 by New Empire Builders. New Empire Builders is a SOCAP12 media partner.